 |
"Suicide Run"
Dark Horse Presents #138
Dark Horse
Script by Alan Grant
Art by Frank Teran
Cover by Frank Teran
December 1998 |
In 2029, a resistance unit seeks to destroy Skynet's vital data
control tower.
Story Summary
A resistance unit attacks the vital Skynet data control
tower. They carry a young woman with bone cancer, unable to
use her legs. A Terminator pursues them up the wall of the
control tower and kills the soldiers, leaving the unarmed
woman for interrogation. But she is outfitted with a plastic
explosive that won't show up on initial scans. As the
Terminator begins to interrogate her at the top of the
tower, she turns up the volume on the music player connected
to the headphones she wears which drown out the sounds of
war and the screams of her dying comrades. The volume control
triggers the explosive and the tower comes down.
Notes from the Terminator chronology
The first page of this story indicates it takes place in
2029. Additionally, page 6 implies it takes place before the
death of Lt. Stamford in "Death Valley" Part 1 (which is why
I have placed it at this point in the chronology).
Didja Know?
This is a 10-page black-and-white comic book story that first appeared
in
Dark Horse Presents #138.
Didja Notice?
On page 1 of the story, Ali's narrative refers to the smell
and hot crackle of arc-guns. I've been unable to determine
exactly what an arc-gun is, either inside or outside the
Terminator universe.
Despite being a tank with a wheeled, continuous tread, the
Skynet attack machine on page 2 refers to itself as a
"hover-killer".
On page 6, Ali's narrative states that Connor's trusted
lieutenant, Stamford, sent her and her group to destroy
Skynet's data control tower. Stamford is presumably a
reference to Lt. Martin Stamford, who later commits suicide
rather than expose what he knows of John Connor's history in
"Death Valley" Part 1.
On page 8, Ali's narrative indicates her
parents got caught in the fallout from the nukes dropped on
Burbank "fifteen years ago," resulting in her having uranium
in her genes and strontium-90 in her bones, resulting in her
soon-to-come death from bone cancer in mere weeks.
Since the "current" year is stated at the
beginning of the story as 2029, this tells us that nukes
were dropped on Burbank in 2014. Is this also Judgment Day
in this timeline? Or just a later date that Skynet chose to
drop additional nuclear bombs on a human population?
Burbank is a city in Los Angeles County.
Uranium is known to cause mutagenic effects on DNA
and strontium-90 is known to deposit itself mostly in bone
and bone marrow in living organisms, leading to bone cancer,
leukemia, and other types of cancers.
The Terminator that pursues Ali and her group appears to
have a gun mounted to its forearm.
On page 9 of the story, one of the resistance soldiers
protecting Ali has to blast through what he calls "plexi-glaz".
Presumably, he is referring to a variation or brand name of
Plexiglas,
the trademark name of transparent thermoplastic of polymethyl methacrylate made by the
Rohm
and Haas Company, now owned by Dow Chemical.
Back to Terminator Episode
Studies